November 29, 2017

The illusion of simultaneity

by liberal japonicus
In his book Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud writes (and illustrates) how humans always can see ourselves in other things

I'd argue that this is what makes it so easy to anthropomorphize things. However, I'm wondering if there is a word for assuming that things are occurring at the same time. Speculation and youtube videos below the fold

I use music videos for writing classes and I want to use this one, Charlie Puth's "We don't talk anymore". Clearly, the director's goal is to give the illusion that the events in the two videos are happening at the same time. Take a look

It's a clever video and I'm curious how my students will describe it. But finding that video led to this video, which is a Smule app duet, with Charlie Puth singing with a Malaysian singer who, it seems, just posts things on youtube.

At first, I thought this was an actual duet, with both singers singing at the same time. I didn't know about Smule, but research shows it is an app that allows you to sing duets with other people, and by having hit songs sung by the people who made them famous as one half of the duet, they can monetize the app, which seems like an interesting business model, especially since the singer records his part only once and then anyone who gets the app can sing along. Like this.

Whatta gas. I've got to find an speaker of this language cause I'm dying to know what he's saying.

As this was percolating in my brain, this Guardian article on the trend to sing duets with dead artists appeared. I thought the first volley in this was when a dead Fred Astaire was hired out by his daughter (over the objections of his widow) to dance with a Dust Devil, but this article says that Diet Coke and Coors got their first. Of course, there is the famous Gatorade commercial with a 39 year old Michael Jordan playing his 23 year old self.

But I am starting to think that this illusion of simultaneity (fauxsynchronicity?) is a real threat because it bypasses rational thought. It is impossible to look at one of those Smule duets and not think that they are singing at the same time. In fact, I can't count how many online foodfights happen because two people don't seem to understand that the other person is not on the same schedule as they are and vice versa, but I only realized it because I fell into watching a Smule duet. Thoughts?

Comments

Infamously tough stuff, but this might be in his category of hyalo-image, or mirror-image:

"Mirrors disrupt time. And when there is a hall of mirrors, which Deleuze calls a crystal (for a crystal is little other than an object made of many little shards of reflecting surface), then we have an entity in which notions of before and after start to literally break down. Films in which parts of the film mirror each other, which are full of short-circuits of this sort, he calls image crystals, or crystal-images."

Yes, they are singing at the same time, but it is just an illusion and I think one of the affordances of technology is that it can create this illusion so quickly and easily, but we can't stand back and critically analyze it.

About Deleuze, cool stuff. I have heard the name, but you push me to take a closer look. thx

I'm interested in the meaning of simultaneity on astronomical scales. Even if we put aside relativistic concerns (aside, perhaps, for the finite and reference-independent speed of light), what does it really mean for two events to occur at the same time if they happen a billion light years apart?

hsh :
One cannot put aside relativity in talking about events separated by large distances, or in the presence of significant gravity

Einstein showed that there is no such thing as simultuneity of events separated by significant "interval". Different observers, measuring the separation in time and space, will come up with different answers, some perceiving less time and more space than others, and no one of those observers is more correct than any other.

There is no way to escape this and talk about time over even moderate astronomical distances in purely Newtonian terms; such discussions are "not even wrong".

One cannot put aside relativity in talking about events separated by large distances, or in the presence of significant gravity.

Sure you can. I just did! It won't mean anything in terms of the actual physics involved. But it simplifies the discussion about what the meaninglessness of simultaneity across large distances for people with no background in relativity.

In other words, simultaneity - even in a hypothetical Newtonian universe - means what? That it means even less (or simply still means nothing) in a relativistic universe only adds to the point.

There is no big clock in the sky that we're all looking at. Even if we were, we would have no way of communicating to each other what we observed about that clock in a short enough time for it to matter.

If we know (for the sake of discussion) how far away something is, at an astronomical scale, we know how long the light which shows it took to get here. Which means we know how long ago something that we see there actually happened. The presence of significant gravity can modify the time involved, but the principle remains the same.

It seems like, if we know what was happening here then, we can say that the two events were simultaneous.

Doesn't matter what clock they were using, just like it doesn't matter if they were travelling at relativistic speeds (which would make their clocks run slower). Once light leaves, it travels at a set rate. So the time to get here isn't impacted by their speed; nor by the speed of their clocks.

You're on stronger ground asking "so what?" I would say the answer there is, it's mostly only relevant when it's long enough ago that we're talking about distinct stages in the evolution of the cosmos.

Two observers. They disagree about the order in which distant events occur.

Both are correct.

The entire idea of simultaneity assumes that time and space are different things, but they're not. They're different aspects of a more fundamental quantity, "interval", which is the same for all observers.

Space itself expanding throws quite a spanner into the works there at least at really long distances.I know astrophysicits who simply refuse to put numbers to distances once we get out of the local group of galaxies (most use red-shift as a stand-in because that is solid ground).

Joel, try looking at it like this:
Tom, on Earth observes event X before he observes event Y. But, because they are at different distances, the light he is seening has taken different lengths of time to get here. So he knows that event Y actually occurred first.

Sally, orbiting Sirius, observes event X after she observes event Y. The travel times are different for her, too. But not so much as to alter the order from her observation, just the time between them.

In short, what (when) they observe something is NOT the same as when they know things occurred. They don't disagree on when, or in what order, things happened. For all that they observed them in a different sequence.

Considering the expansion of the universe, as Hartmut mentions, relativistic effects of gravity and motion on time (and motion on distance?), and the relative motion(s) between and among objects observing each other, I'm not so sure it's as simple as you're presenting it, wj.

You're doing a calculation based on time, as you measure it in your frame of reference, and distance, as you measure it in your frame of reference, and assuming that someone in some other frame of reference, measuring them both differently, is going to come up with the same answer you did. It's ultimately meaningless.

But, because they are at different distances, the light he is seening has taken different lengths of time to get here. So he knows that event Y actually occurred first.

Handwaving. Not physics. Not correct.

There is no such thing as a single correct ordering of events over astronomical distances.

Read Einstein's popularizations, which are quite accessible. Pay particular attention to the "twin paradox", in which one twin is sent off on a fast rocket and returns via a fast rocket, and is younger than the other twin.
Neither is "the wrong age". One has experienced some of the interval separating arrival and departer as space, while the other has experienced that same portion of the interval as elapsed time. Both are correct.

Clocks run more slowly on the surface of the Earth than they do in geosynchronous orbit. The correct function of GPS actually depends on this phenomenon. It is utterly incompatible with any Newtonian account of the type you are trying to construct.

For events separated by astronomical scale interval, there is no simultuneity, because there is no "now" that can be agreed on by all observers, and no observer is more correct than any other.

There is no such thing as a single correct ordering of events over astronomical distances.

Clearly we have a different understanding of the physics involved.

As for the twin paradox, the critical point is that one twin doesn't get going at a different velocity without acceleration. Which changes things substantially. Once you know which one experienced acceleration, you know who is the baseline and who has had his clock changed.

Does it go without saying that my Frame of Reference is something that fills the entire universe? And so does Sirius Sally's.

I only mention it because I vaguely remember that grasping that idea was my Aha! moment when I took Special Relativity long, long ago (or far, far away, depending).

As for the twins: the "traveling" one could make the trip using constant (in absolute value) 1g acceleration. The "stay-at-home" is meanwhile experiencing 1g acceleration, if "home" is Earth. Their individual clocks can't tell the difference between gravity and acceleration. So I don't think acceleration figures into the twin "paradox".

Yes, I know: the "stay-at-home" could be floating in empty space at 0g the whole time. Nonetheless, I vaguely remember the twin "paradox" being explained in the Special Relativity course, wherein acceleration was verboten.

The real mind-bender for me is rotation, anyhow. You can be in a closed box in empty space and still be able to tell that it's you who are rotating, and not the universe.

It's my impression that one of the main points of relativity theory is to deny that a baseline can be identified, because no observer is privileged (except for with respect to Tspin/rotation, as Tony points out. That's really weird.)

lj, 8:32: ...that it can create this illusion so quickly and easily, but we can't stand back and critically analyze it.

Actually, we can, do, and have done for a long time. Split-screen is a rare technique, but for the sake of argument, I am equating or comparing it to what in film studies is called montage*, the juxtaposition of time-separated shots or frames closely together to create the illusion of synchronicity or continuity.

A classic example, closely related that I presume you have seen is the Tonight Quintet of West Side Story, where Tony, Maria, Maria's sister, Bernardo, the Sharks and the Jets are singing in separate places, and very likely filmed separately, but the editing and sound design make them appear to be singing simultaneously. It can be compared, and I haven't seen a stage production so can't say, to the more obvious synchronicity of having the singers all on the same stage.

A question remains as to whether the synchronicity is actually on the film or in the perceptions of the viewer. I tend toward the latter, but recognize techniques that guide the watcher toward the illusions of what is called classic continuity.

The position and focus of both singers in the frame for instance. Imagine the "b" singer twenty yards back from the camera.

*According to Wiki, "montage" is a very special kind of quick-cut editing. I have seen it used as a description of most editing, and compared mostly to mise-en-scene and action within the frame, long shots. If you want to use editing instead of montage, ok.

I don't think that 100+ years (the history of film) is a long time, especially since the first 50 years had innumerable barriers (lack of sound, black and white, etc.) to support the understanding that you were suspending disbelief. And when it happens in a movie as part of an artistic decision, it is different, I would submit, than an app that throws it off as part of its business model. I'd say that it is coming at us a lot faster than before, and that's part of why people are having difficulties communicating.

It's my impression that one of the main points of relativity theory is to deny that a baseline can be identified, because no observer is privileged (except for with respect to Tspin/rotation, as Tony points out. That's really weird.)

What wj points out regarding acceleration I think is at the heart of it. Rotation requires acceleration, too, just perpendicular to velocity. For time dilation and length contraction to exist, there has to be some other frame of reference to compare them to. Whose time dilates and whose length contracts relative to someone else's can't go both ways.

The twin paradox can't work if one twin is only younger than the other from his own point of view, but older than the other from the other's point of view. One is older and one is younger, absolutely, once the high-velocity trip has been taken.

I don't think the 1G acceleration trip's equivalence to gravity applies as it concerns time dilation, either. I honestly can't say exactly why, but it wouldn't make sense. Or maybe it does, but only to a point, because the velocity effect on time overtakes the acceleration/gravity effect on time once you get to a large fraction of c.

Roy Moore co-authored a study course in 2011 stipulating that it should be illegal for women to run for public office. Should they run, it is the moral obligation of every American to refuse to vote for them.

He will be elected and republican women, while they are still permitted to vote, will reward him with a reverse cowgirl ride in smeared eyeliner in exchange for tax cuts and the confiscation of their IUDs.

When seniors are denied chemotherapy, an AR-15 will serve as their insurance.

Seems more likely that there will be a huge negative impact on (population numbers of) the GOP's primary demographic. Unless they are careful to exempt that bastion of socialism: Medicare. But not to worry, Ryan has his sights on that next, if he doesn't manage to include it this time around.

I know we don't generally post/link to tweets, but I would just like to highlight that in response to this tweet from Trump to Teresa May, when she said he was wrong to retweet anti-Muslim propoganda put out by Britain First, an extreme rightwing islamophobic organisation:

.@Theresa_May, don’t focus on me, focus on the destructive Radical Islamic Terrorism that is taking place within the United Kingdom. We are doing just fine

Brendan Cox, the widower of Jo Cox, the MP who was killed last year by a racist shouting "Britain First!" as he murdered her, has replied to Trump's tweet with the following:

You have a mass shooting every single day in your country, your murder rate is many times that of the UK, your healthcare system is a disgrace, you can’t pass anything through a congress that you control. I would focus on that.

This won't of course be seen by Republicans and rightwingers in the US, I wish it could be.

They seem to be chipping away at the very foundations of modern, civilized society. I can't fathom what retrograde motivations animate these people. It's mind boggling. Even "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'" Ronald Reagan would think this sh1t was lunacy.

it's simple! they must pass corporate tax cuts for companies that don't want it and don't need it in order for them to do things with the extra money that they aren't already doing with the current profits.

The White House and CIA have been considering a package of secret proposals to allow former US intelligence officers to run privatized covert actions, intelligence gathering, and propaganda missions, according to three sources who’ve been briefed on or have direct knowledge of the proposals.

The White House and CIA have been considering a package of secret proposals to allow former US intelligence officers to run privatized covert actions, intelligence gathering, and propaganda missions, according to three sources who’ve been briefed on or have direct knowledge of the proposals.

Big cut in corporate taxes, S-corp income taxed at the corporate rate, loosening or elimination of inheritance tax. Also, double the personal exemption, and eliminate a number of exemptions typically taken by individuals or joint filers.

The latter set of changes will probably net a modest benefit for a lot of middle-class folks.

To make the numbers add up long-term, the stuff that will benefit middle-class folks will go away over time. Corporate tax rates stay.

Traditionally, this is known as a long con.

this also sounds fantastic

yay, it's a revival of letters of marque and reprisal!

hey, why not, it's in the constitution. also very popular among conservative beard-strokers ever since 9/11.

privatizing national security! it's not just an 18th C throwback, it's a business model!

I listened to an interview with Chuck Grassley on the way home last night. I now understand why we need to get rid of the estate tax (and I wasn't yelling at the radio and hitting my steering wheel or anything like that).

SIEGEL: I want to ask you about estate taxes. The Tax Policy Center estimates that nationwide only about 80 family-owned small business and small farm estates will face any estate tax in 2017. Why is it so important to raise the ceiling on estate taxes when already a couple can pass on an estate of up to $11 million tax free?

GRASSLEY: I suppose to show appreciation for people that have lived frugally early in their life, delayed spending so they could save. It seems to me there ought to be some incentive and reward for those who work and save and invest in America as opposed to those who just live from day to day. You could take the same hundred-thousand-dollar income for two people - one of them, they spend it, have it all spent at the end of the year and the others have saved a fourth of it and invested and create jobs and leave something for the future. The first person leaves nothing for the future.

SIEGEL: But very, very few couples that make a combined income of $100,000 are going to have estates of $20 million that they pass on. I mean, that's a tiny fraction of people.

GRASSLEY: Listen, in no way is my statement meant to dispute the statistics you gave me. I'm giving you a philosophical reason for recognizing savings versus those who want to live high on the hog and not save anything or invest in the commodities.

It's all about "the commodities"! And stop living high on the hog, people!

Orrin Hatch is alleged to be smarter than Chuck Grassley. Hatch, who has been a Senator since Saint Ronny's first term and has therefore served "under" seven Presidents, said into a microphone and in front of a TV camera that He, Trump is “one of the best I’ve served under.”

It's not that GOP politicians are stupid. It's that they think the American electorate is.

And who can blame them? Remember Joe the Plumber? (I wonder what his "estate" is worth at the moment.) The American electorate in 2008 turned out to be a bit smarter than Joe the Plumber. By 2016 it proved to have got considerably dumber.

I say "electorate", not "population", because of course there's about 3 million head worth of difference between them.

GRASSLEY: It's because of the concern of the debt that we're very much writing this bill and because over the last eight years, the economy has only grown on an average of 1.4 percent. The 50-year average is about 3 to 3.5 percent. So we have a situation in our country where the economy isn't growing, and the whole idea behind this is that we get the economy growing at 3 percent so we can start to pay down on the national debt like we did between 1997 and the year 2000.

Yeah, so we paid down the debt when the exemption on the estate tax was ...hmmm, let's see ... $600,000 to $675,000!!! And the rate was 55%.

Income tax rates were more or less where they are now, if anything a bit higher at the low end, but the same top rate. Same corporate tax rate.

If we're going to consider the 50-year average for GDP growth, maybe we should notice that the earlier part of the last 50 years was the better part as GDP growth was concerned. We should then consider that wealth and income were more evenly distributed during those earlier years than in the later years. Then we might wonder why we're (the royal "we" ...or something) are re-writing the tax code to both further and accelerate the concentration of wealth in fewer hands to somehow return to the growth that occurred under the opposite conditions.

We are probably heading for war with Iran. First stop was Yemen and Syria. Syria didn't go well,in part because our foreign policy there has been utterly incoherent, with people wanting to fix it by plunging deeper in, and the war in Yemen, apart from being near-genocidal, is also turning the Houthis into the next Hezbollah (meaning competent war-fighters on Iran's side). Total freaking disaster from any viewpoint except those of arms manufacturers and maybe the freaks (of both parties) who inhabit DC and see every failed intervention as a reason to intervene more. So apparently stage 2 is to build on this record of success by picking a fight with Hezbollah.

Eventually we should get to Iran. If Putin is pulling the strings, he is picking a fight with himself, but I don't think the story regarding who influences Trump was ever mainly about Russia. He has surrounded himself with people who hate Iran, love Israel, and seem to be head over heels in love with the Saudis.

GDP growth since 1947, a slow decline over that time if you smooth the data. Some, mostly highly paid liars, will say the simultaneity of individual tax rates and corporate tax rates following an even steeper decline over the same period (91% the highest tax bracket among dozens of brackets in 1947 and plunging since then) is an illusion.

Now, America makes shit up across the board to suit whatever pigshit it requires at any given moment, so maybe the simultaneity is these trendlines is an illusion, but we live in a country in which the right fingerfucking Reverend Roy Moore can get elected to the highest legislative body in the land while Garrison Keillor's thoughts on literature are now denied to me and his reputation and career are shot to hell because he set his hand on an unidentified woman's back and moved it six inches and apologized at the time and had his apology accepted.

Facts can deceive. I mean, ONLY 25% or thereabouts of the Confederacy owned human beings as property, so what's the problem, while the rest of the southern gentility fanned their vapors away on their sharecropper front stoops as magnolia perfume and the sounds of the lash wafted over the slave property bringing the cotton in, so hillbilly butt hurt in 2017 could live to be the subject of elegy.

The Union Armies neglected to stop the scourge of mint juleps and pecan pie and Knoxville Summer of 1915 corrupting the rest of the Nation, just like the Allies in World War II somehow permitted the continued enjoyment of Franz Schubert lieder and other Germanic high culture despite it being the soundtrack at Bergen-Belsen.

Those who live to tell the tale will be enthralled by the firing of the Mueller team and the shutting down of all Congressional inquiries into the stealing of the 2016 election, and while impeachment proceedings may be undertaken, Donald Rump, the apotheosis of the entire vermin conservative movement since Reconstruction, will hole up in the penthouse at Mar-a-Lago to conduct a major murderous land war in the Mideast, which could move to a worldwide nuclear World War III (the mid-east coast of Florida will be spared nuclear annihilation by Russian warheads (you know why don't you?) and the nuking of North Korea with the probable destruction of much of Seoul South Korea as a sideshow, order ICE to round up 800,000 Dreamers, who are more authentically American, and if not American, then decent and human, than any pigfucking republican conservative we permit to infest our government, and then proceed to murder Americans with the destruction of the social safety net.

Not necessarily in that order, and perhaps without simultaneity, but in some serial fashion, as is the practice of republican serial killers.

ABC (via cleek): Flynn promised full cooperation to the Mueller team and is prepared to testify that candidate Trump "directed him to make contact with the Russians.”

Russell: Now we will see who, if anyone, actually gives a shit.

Not sure why you think anyone, other than those already with contempt for Trump, would. I keep reading stuff suggesting that "[We have seen] credulity-straining defenses offered by the White House in the face of charges against Manafort and Papadopoulos. But they're not going to work now that former White House national security adviser Michael Flynn has pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI."

But why not? Trump has long since demonstrated that he lives in a universe of his own. And, so far, his fans seem willing to take his word over the evidence of their senses. Why would this time be any different?

I think it's entirely possible that Mueller's investigation will reveal that Trump either solicited, or directly worked with, Russian nationals to swing the 2016 election, and that nothing will be done about it.

So apparently the Israelis asked Trump to help them in the U.N. and that is what one of the conversations was about. They were colluding with Israel in trying to persuade Russia to take Israel’s side in a U.N. vote condemning the settlements. They were colluding with Israel against Obama. They failed, btw.

But I don’t suppose Trump’s opponents for the most part want to put it that way. Kind of embarrassing to lots of people if they say the Trump team was colluding with the Israelis against the Obama Administration. I am happy to fill the gap. This is an Administration packed to the rooftop with people sympathetic to the Israeli far right and to the Saudis. I wouldn’t call it collusion because it is such a melodramatic word to describe how scummy elites in different countries sometimes have common interests. It is a match made in heaven.

They were colluding with Israel in trying to persuade Russia to take Israel’s side in a U.N. vote condemning the settlements.

honestly, that seems pretty banal. "incoming administration reached out to allies to coordinate policy" isn't going to flip any Trump voters to D, even if it did counter the active administration in its final month.

As for banal, in one sense yes, it is. But as a matter of accuracy, in that particular meeting with the Russian which Flynn lied about, he was colluding with Israel.

It wouldn’t flip votes to Democrats, but I do read paleocon types in the comments at the American Conservative who are disgusted and disillusioned by Trump’s militarism. You can laugh at their gullibility and they deserve it, but some really thought he was serious about his criticism of the Iraq War and thought we would be pulling back from our interventionist ways. They had to have ignored Trump’s other comments about taking oil and wiping out families and bringing back torture, but I am not going to try to explain how people are willfully blind to the flaws of their candidates. The point is there is a subset of Trump voters who are becoming disillusioned with him— they may not become Democrats, but at least a few won’t be voting for him next time.

Assuming there is a next time, of course. Maybe he won’t make it through his first term.

Also, I don’t really expect Russiagate to hurt his support levels that much— to the extent some Trump voters regret their choice it will be because of his policies or his utter lack of character unbalanced by any great achievement you could point to.

I think it's entirely possible that Mueller's investigation will reveal that Trump either solicited, or directly worked with, Russian nationals to swing the 2016 election, and that nothing will be done about it.

But as a matter of accuracy, in that particular meeting with the Russian which Flynn lied about, he was colluding with Israel.

As a matter of accuracy, that hardly scratches the surface of Flynn's unethical and/or illegal actions.

As a matter of accuracy, ditto for Trump et al.

It's a target-rich environment.

it will be because of his policies or his utter lack of character

Trump's character or lack thereof has been vividly on display for the last 40 years. He's not really a policy guy and his supporters aren't really policy people beyond vague goals like Make American Great Again, or Build The Wall, or Lock Her Up.

If he fails to achieve anything of note, it'll be because the (D)'s obstructed it. Or the Fake News MSM misrepresented what he said he would do in the first place.